Jul. 17, 2012

Marissa Mayer

A word from the editor

Today’s editorial is part of a Wausau Daily Herald coverage focus we’re calling “Greater Wausau.” This ongoing initiative will celebrate the good things about life in the greater Wausau area, present a call to action to address community issues and hold decision-makers accountable for building a Greater Wausau.Look for Greater Wausau coverage throughout the Daily Herald in print, online and on our mobile sites.Your feedback is appreciated. Contact Editor Mark Treinen at 715-845-0655 or mtreinen@wdhprint.com if you have story ideas or thoughts about this initiative.

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Marissa Mayer, a 1993 Wausau West High School graduate, became the toast of the tech world Monday when she announced that she would leave her longtime post as a top executive at Google and become the chief executive officer at Yahoo.

Could this be the first step of a turnaround for the struggling Yahoo? Is Mayer, who already was one of the most powerful women in the tech world, perhaps making a career mistake? And how will the fact, revealed late Monday, that she is six months pregnant with her first child affect her job?

It was a feeding frenzy of speculation and tech-world gossip.

For those of us in Wausau, it's always gratifying and a little exciting to watch someone who grew up here making a mark on the world stage. We congratulate Mayer on her new job -- and, of course, on the new addition to her family. And we will be among those following closely what she does in her new post.

As a company, Yahoo has seen better days. In April, the firm announced it would lay off 2,000 employees -- about 14 percent of its workforce, according to an Associated Press report. The company also has cycled through executives, with Mayer becoming its fifth CEO in five years.

Mayer's specialty at Google was "user experience." It was her job to think through exactly how the product, whether it was a search or one of the other tools she developed, such as Google Earth and Google News, would actually be used and understood by the average person.

Yahoo products offer many good things for Internet users, but the firm is not known for its clean designs or ease of user experience. In fact, in some quarters, it's known for the opposite.

It could well be that Mayer will bring to the company precisely the set of skills Yahoo most needs right now.

Her success is the result of her own incredible drive, her hard work and her extraordinary mind. Those who knew her here say all of these were obvious from the time she was growing up. But it's no knock against her achievements to say that she also benefited from the good luck of being in the right place (Stanford University) at the right time (around the time Google was being founded).

She also had the benefit of having a solid educational foundation, which she gained in Wausau.

And here's a lesson all of us can learn from: Mayer would not be where she is today if she hadn't taken a significant risk.

In 1999, a job at Google was not the safest choice for her. She had offers from bigger, more established companies. She decided to become Google's first female engineer because she had confidence in the startup team and she thought she could learn from the experience.

Mayer got to where she is by taking a risk, then throwing herself into what she loved to do.

Her move from Google to Yahoo represents another big risk. We wish her good luck, and we look forward to seeing where her extraordinary career leads her next.